Brexit Impact on Northern Ireland

Sorry, my mistake. I thought the last post had the same graph again, that's where the 70/30 reply came from.

With regards the last graph about devolution, I'm not really bothered whether there is Stormont or Joint Authority as long as it is what the majority want.

Arlene just saying it as it is perceived and perception is everything. Very hard you'll have to admit in NI politics to sit on the fence if you're a bigwig, one side or the other will always be pulling you down.

The only things that will rectify the impacts of Brexit on NI are 1) the UK rejoining the EU 2) the Republic leaving the EU 3) the joint peoples of NI and the island as a whole agreeing some new state.

All three seem equally unlikely - so there it is and there it will stay. As long as a lid is kept on violence, there'll be loads of dosh to be made up North just the way it is.

No iteration of 'self rule has worked in NI. That's the facts.

How long people will keep trying something that has failed remains to be seen. I think the calls to allow the people decide to try another way will and are growing louder.

So you don't want to see any return to Stormont and the executive back up and running?

Interesting.

The same as any electorate will do when they want change.

We have had constitutional change and government policy change here and elsewhere by sheer dint of the electorate not standing for it/vocally expressing a wish via public protest and demonstrations.

Big Seamus with words of wisdom.

Imagine, a colonial power forcing its will on a smaller neighbour. I wonder do these people even read back what they are about to say before posting it.

That's all it is - Jim showboating to his own.

More proof, if you even needed it, that this is all about the results of the last Assembly election and the NIP and WF are convenient scapegoats to hide behind.

Donaldson pulled out of The View last night.

Could mean anything (twitter rumours of trouble in the DUP camp) but most likely means a lot will depend on the local election results. Donaldson will not want to face a grilling just before they go to the polls.

Don't know about Unionist behaviour since the Anglo-Irish Agreement, but certainly the Conservative loss of interest in the union is not a response to unionist behaviour during Brexit; it happened before that. Brexit only happened the way it did because Conservatives lost interest in Ireland and ceased to value the union. Unionist at first didn't realise this and are now, mostly, in denial about it.

To be honest, I don't think the Tory interest in the union was ever an outcome of the fact that Ulster Unionist MPs took the Tory whip. They were rarely or never reliant on them to do so; Ulster MPs were not numerous enough to make the difference between having a majority and not having one.

Ulster Unionist MPs stopped taking the Tory whip in 1972, because they were pissed off about Sunningdale. But it was a considerable time after that that the Tories lost interest in the Union.

Thatcher was emotionally committed to the Union ("As British as Finchley") but only on the basis that she didn't have to understand it. She simply refused to engage with social or political realities that didn't reinforce the "as British as Finchley" view of Ulster. The result was a decade of stagnation.

When Thatcher's star waned and she eventually fell, things could change. I think the "UK has no selfish strategic interest in NI" statement came in about 1990 or 1991; it was pretty startling to hear a Tory government say that the UK had no strategic interest in part of the UK's own territory. That opened the gates to nearly a decade of change that culminated in the GFA, and the commitment that the people of Ireland, North and South, could decide their own future without interference from any external party (i.e. Westminster). That, of course, was the work of a Labour government, but it was building on a lot of work done in the 1990s by the Tory government, and the Tories did not dissent from that position.

At that point the UK was officially neutral about the union but the Tories could, of course, be a unionist party, and still professed to be. But it seems to have been a profession that had little impact on their policies and positions. While in opposition from then until 2010, I don't recall them adopting a single political or policy position that reflected a unionist conviction. And it's clear that, since Euroscepticism/brexitry became the dominant issue in the party, the maintenance of the union and the wishes, interests and welfare of NI have been, at best, a very distant second in importance to securing the hardest possible Brexit. A few backbench Tories have expressed dismay at the party's loss of concern for the union, but so far as I can recall nobody has actually rebelled over it. Intra-Tory opposition to the Westminster framework has often paid lip service to the union, but the Tory opponents of the WF have never urged that it be replaced with something that will effectively secure, sustain or defend the union; rather, they just want something that will deliver an ever-harder Brexit, which as far as the union is concerned will obviously have the opposite effect.

Well, here's a theory:

As long as the IRA was engaged in armed struggle, the Tories were committed to the union not because they actually cared about the union as because "we can't give in to terrorism", or its subtle variant "we can't be seen to give in to terrorism". You may think that reducing the republican movement to "terrorism" is a gross caricature, but undoubtedly they took it seriously. And their conception of Britain is of a sturdy, self-reliant nation that won't or can't be bullied.

Once the ceasefires took hold and the republican movement was committed to exclusively political and constitutional means of advancing the cause, this factor was removed, and that gave the Tories implicit permission to become more and more open about the fact that maintaining the union is not really on their agenda any more.